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“I have come to a very uncomfortable decision: to hold my nose and vote for John Tory. I urge all (Olivia) Chow supporters to look at the consequences of another Ford for four years and vote strategically for Tory.” — Toronto Star letter writer Ken Chevis.

Strategic voting in the 2014 Toronto mayoral race has become a hot and contentious topic — one that pundits and partisans suggest is a symptom of a flawed municipal electoral process that needs revamping.

“The last four years have been such a polarizing time for Torontonians, in terms of the Ford factor, that in a way it’s understandable that the issue of strategic voting may be prevalent for a significant number of voters,” Ryerson University politics professor Myer Siemiatycki said Saturday.

Those in the ABF (Anybody But Ford) camp are struggling with two impulses, Semiatycki said: Do I vote for the candidate I most prefer, or do I vote for the person who has the best chance of beating Doug Ford?

“That’s the no-man’s-land in which strategic voting dilemmas start to play out and, potentially, even become agonizing for voters.”

Brian Kelcey, campaign manager for former Toronto mayoralty candidate David Soknacki, said the message they heard knocking on doors was an “overwhelming strategic voting lesson loud and clear.”

“People said to David, ‘We love you, we love your ideas, you’ve got the best platform, but I’ve got to make my choice based on getting rid of Rob or Doug Ford — and maybe talk to me next time,’” Kelcey said Saturday.

He finds the strategic vote trend troubling.

“It’s a matter of voters choosing to vote in a way that serves to vote against somebody rather than making a conscious, positive choice to vote for someone based on their normal political affiliations or normal beliefs.”

Michael Laxer, a self-described socialist candidate running in Etobiocke’s Ward 6, is also disturbed that voters, especially those inclined to support Olivia Chow, now plan to vote for John Tory because recent polls place him as the frontrunner.

“John Tory has become the strategic, all embodying alternative to Doug and Rob Ford. He’s seen as the person you have to vote for if your apparent objective is to stop the Fords and their agenda,” Laxer said.

But Laxer says there is a “dangerous logic” in strategic voting for those wanting a progressive alternative to the Ford brothers when Tory’s politics are not all that much different — minus what Tory refers to as the “chaos and division.”

“John Tory is presenting himself now as a centrist, but he’s not. He was the head of the Conservative Party. He is blue-blood Bay Street as it gets,” Laxer said. “He is the embodiment of the corporate and right-wing agenda in Toronto and I believe he will be a very strong, fierce and very effective opponent of unions, workers and public services and programs in the city.”

Asked last week about someone “agonizing” about voting with his head or heart, Chow responded: “Why would we replace a Tory with another Tory?”

Jeff Silverstein, Doug Ford’s campaign manager, said the pundits are wrong if they say and believe that the central ballot-box issue is getting rid of the Fords.

“It’s about record and conviction,” Silverstein said Saturday evening. “If anyone is going to be guided by strategic voting, it will be people who will want a mayor who will carry on with the progrss that has been made.”

He disputes there is an anyone-but-Ford sentiment, and if “it existed at all it was a product of the mayor, directed at the mayor. Doug is not his brother.”

Ryerson’s Siemiatycki says this could be the last municipal election where voters have to struggle with the dilemma of strategic voting, if the province brings in a ranked ballot initiative, which has already been approved by city council.

“There’s recognition that there’s a flaw in our current election system; that it kind of requires too many voters to not vote their preferred choice sometimes and, secondly, it does elect people with less than 50 per cent of votes cast.”

Allowing voters to pick their first and then second choices would give politicians a “stronger mandate perhaps, with more legitimacy,” he said.

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